Robert Stein, Who Led McCall’s and Redbook for Decades, Dies at 90

By PAUL VITELLO

July 17, 2014

Robert Stein, who helped expand the scope of women’s magazines as editor in chief of McCall’s and Redbook in the early stages of the modern women’s movement, publishing articles about race and politics and introducing readers to the nascent writings of feminist leaders like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, died on July 9 in Westport, Conn. He was 90.

His son Keith said the cause was cancer.

Mr. Stein edited Redbook from 1958 to 1965, and ran its sister publication, McCall’s, in two stints, 1965 to 1967 and 1972 to 1986 — a three-decade period of radical change for women that coincided with a steady decline in circulation for women’s magazines.

Along with a handful of other innovative editors in women’s magazines, Mr. Stein sought to recover his audience by supplementing the traditional fare of dress patterns, consumer advice and dinner recipes with food for thought.

He led in-depth coverage of the civil rights movement in its early days, interviewed President John F. Kennedy on nuclear weapons, polled seminarians in 1961 on their religious beliefs (only 29 percent believed in an actual heaven and hell, the Redbook article said) and built star-studded stables of writers at McCall’s and Redbook.

Among them were Ms. Freidan and Ms. Steinem, as well as Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Harper Lee, Barbara Tuchman and Pauline Kael, whom he fired from McCall’s for unremittingly critical reviews of popular movies like “Born Free” and “The Sound of Music.”

“Women are interested in thinking — civil rights, peace,” Mr. Stein said in a 1966 interview with The Christian Science Monitor. “They are interested in people, but on a more sophisticated basis. They want substance they can relate to their own lives.”

As an associate editor at Redbook, he commissioned a profile of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956, one of the first of the civil rights leader in a national publication.

Redbook became a showcase for columnists. (Dr. King contributed several columns in the 1960s.) Ms. Mead, the anthropologist, wrote about family life; Ms. Carson, the environmentalist, about pesticides in the food chain. To weigh in on child care, Dr. Benjamin Spock, the influential baby doctor, was hired away from Ladies’ Home Journal.

At McCall’s, besides hiring Ms. Kael to write about movies and Ms. Steinem to chronicle sexism in the world at large, he hired President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 22-year-old daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, to write about “young Americans.” He published articles there on teenage pregnancy, birth control and breast cancer research, as well as fiction by writers like Anne Tyler and Kurt Vonnegut.

Robert Stein with the actress Helen Hayes. His magazines mixed consumer advice and recipes with food for thought.

Ms. Friedan, a Rockland County mother of three, had written about homemaking, breast-feeding, women in the arts and other subjects for various magazines when she pitched an idea to McCall’s — to write about the women attending the 15th reunion of her graduating class at Smith College.

McCall’s gave her the go-ahead, but then rejected the article she wrote for portraying her well-educated subjects — most of them homemakers — as depressed and oppressed. She then offered it to Mr. Stein, who was at Redbook. He rejected it, too, citing one particular analogy — which equated women who suppressed their ambitions to raise families with people who suppressed their misgivings to walk into concentration camps — as overboard. (Ms. Friedan later said she regretted the analogy.)

“I didn’t think our readers would identify with this,” Mr. Stein said in an interview for a 2009 book “The Sisterhood: The Inside Story of the Women’s Movement and the Leaders Who Made it Happen,” by Marcia Cohen. “Only the most neurotic housewife would identify with this.”

Ms. Friedan later said the rejections had helped motivate her to develop the article into the 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” which became a landmark manifesto. In the book, she characterized women’s magazines as propaganda organs for the paternalistic ideal of domesticated womanhood. “What I was writing threatened the very foundations of the women’s magazines,” she wrote.

Mr. Stein said that he was hurt by Ms. Friedan’s blanket indictment but that he came to see it as polemical writing just doing its job. In an unpublished memoir, he wrote: “I began to see that reasonable arguments seldom lead to social change. Howls of pain sometimes do.”

Redbook later published excerpts from her book, skipping the “concentration camp” passages.

Robert Stein was born in Manhattan on March 4, 1924, the only child of Isidor and Gussie Stein. His father worked in a Harlem pawnshop. The younger Mr. Stein served in an Army rifle company during World War II, graduated from City College in 1947 and worked for small publications before landing a job as an assistant editor at Redbook in 1951.

For several years he was publisher of The Saturday Review Press, owned by the McCall Corporation, which then owned Redbook and McCall’s. He wrote two books, “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” (1972) and “Getting Your Share: A Woman’s Guide to Divorce” (1989), with Lois Brenner, who became his second wife.

His first marriage, to Dorothy Price Weichel, ended in divorce, as did his second. In addition to his son Keith, he is survived by two other sons, Gregory and Clifford; and three grandchildren.

Redbook was bought by the Hearst Corporation in 1982. McCall’s entered a partnership with the actor Rosie O’Donnell in 2000 and changed its name to “Rosie’s” before folding in 2002.

Mr. Stein was replaced at the helm of McCall’s in 1986 by A. Elizabeth Sloan. Today the editors in chief of all the major women’s magazines are women. Mr. Stein often referred to himself in his later writings as one of the last male editors of a mass-circulation American women’s magazine. “A dinosaur,” he said.